Ryees
Imperishable Fractal
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Futuristic A Long Way Forward『 Melinoe x Ryees 』
- Thread starter Ryees
- Start date
Ryees
Imperishable Fractal
image
/|—Stutter—|
Maybe I forgot... how to think at all?
Another morning broke with Orion still laid amongst the duvet and mountain of pillows that constituted a bed. Some days he rebuilt his room as he had found it, with the four-poster, black-lacquered bedroom that he had come to know. Some days he came back so exhausted from a run that he barely had the wherewithal to load the save file before collapsing into the puddle of plush. This was one of those latter mornings.
He hauled himself upright with a titanic groan, shaking his head to toss his blonde locks back away from his face. With a jaw-cracking yawn, he fished around the pile of covers for his tablet, eventually finding it half-tucked into the pillow case that had become his hug-pillow.
Tapping open the display, he could not help but glance at the envelope in the top right. It had been a long time since he had seen an exclamation point in that corner. The early days had seen an influx of files, containing a myriad of maps, imagery, almanacs, and more: Everything he needed to build himself the landscapes he now traversed every day. Why the device had stopped giving him any new prompts, he could not tell, but he was no less sour for not knowing. New inspiration would have been nice, once in a while.
It had been a few weeks since the snows had passed, and with the green beginning to show in the trees again, Orion's mind's eye flickered to life an image that he had been working on for days, now. He slumped back into the blankets, but he was alert, now. The pen, slotted into the edge of the tablet, was slipped free of its housing, and Orion got to work.
The room in which he slept disappeared in a dazzle of technicolor cubes that broke apart and fizzled into the Nowhere—what he called the place that things went when he erased them. The walls, the bookcases, the bay window, all of it disassembled itself under the back of his pen on the tablet screen, dissolving until all he was left with was the bed in which he lay and the steel cube that formed the boundaries of his home.
The land came first, rolling fields as far as the eye could see. Orion drew a delicate swirl in the air, a single curly-cue floating above the grasses, to prompt the gentle summer breeze that rolled the grasses in verdant waves. A canvas established, he drew in the forest, sparse enough to walk through, but dense enough to provide shelter from the bright yellow ball of the sun that he had just penciled in. A double tap on the grass populated a drop-down menu, and he tapped the last item on the list: Smart Fill.
In a spiraling wave of iridescent color, the world rippled around him. Cubes digistructed themselves as fast as he could keep track of them, their edges and facets warping as the system distorted their polygons and reshaped them into boulders, rivers, clouds, and more, even building the small wildlife that made the sounds of the forest come alive.
|76%.../
|89%.../
|97%.../
|100% Smart Fill Complete!
A quick glance up and around him told Orion that the environment would do; it was not his focus. With a pinch, he zoomed in on the moss-covered outcropping of rocks that jutted over the river. He lassoed the point of it, and copied it over, opening a second tab and copying the image over. With a dropper and a pencil, he took the colors and textures, reshaping the stone and moss into a new shape. Grinning, he stood from his bed, now sitting inside the metal frame perched in the middle of a field. With a tap, his bed dissolved into the same cubes and flitted off to Nowhere. Still in the white T-shirt and red-striped black pants he had worn to bed, he quickly slipped on his shoes and tied them up tight. A minute of stretching would be required, he had learned; running stiff from bed was never safe.
Orion's excitement had bubbled up and over, and, finally, he snatched back up his tablet. Happy with his creation, he lassoed it up, copied it, and brought it back over to the landscape.
|Option...
|Copy
|Cut
|—>Paste
|Delete
|More...
"Uwoah!"
Orion's voice was stolen and he laughed enthusiastically as the ground beneath his feet lurched forward. The grass gave way to stone that carried him forward, and up, and up, and higher and higher, in a soaring arc over the rolling meadows below. A whale, as if breaching from the surface of the ocean, had crested from under the ground, its body made of white stone covered in a dense, plush layer of moss that Orion had fallen into, hands anchored into the dirt to keep his purchase. His tablet, in the leather shoulder bag that held it to his back, fluttered behind him in the wind.
The song that thundered out from the creature's chest rattled his skull, earning another joyous laugh as the creature started to plunge back towards the ground. With a wild grin, Orion released the dirt, getting his balance and taking off at a dead sprint down the whale's head. His arms flailed and his feet skittered as the head arched down, his path becoming a steeper and steeper slope. The ground was rushing up to meet them, barely ten meters below. The nose of the whale punched into the stone, melding with it more than destroying it, as if the stone were water and the beast was simply plunging into the depths. Just before the ground swallowed him, too, Orion leapt forward, nearly level with the ground, hands out to his sides to keep his balance.
The grasses were long and soft, a cushion to soften his fall, and he rolled with the motion, tumbling over one shoulder before kicking forward and landing on his feet. His momentum carried him forward, arms spinning, feet searching for balance. He managed to not fall directly on his face, instead scrabbling into a sprint and—
—off over the edge.
Adrenaline turned to fear in the pit of his stomach. The ground had opened up to a yawning chasm, a mile deep with a sinister red glow at its bottom. I didn't draw this! The thought was as indignant as it was confused. Orion jerked at the straps of his bag, pulling the tablet around to his front and flipping open the cover. His clipboard was still full, and with a frantic paste, he sent the command.
From the wall of the chasm, the whale reemerged. This time, instead of white and moss, it was dark brown brimstone, glowing with chased rivulets of red magma like a furnace burned under its skin. It flew below Orion, who thumped onto its stone back on his side. Instinct told him to push his arms and kick his legs to turn the fall into a roll, but his breath was stolen and he was seeing stars as he struggled to rise to his hands and knees.
Orion barely had time to look up as the whale slammed into the opposite side of the chasm. Throwing himself forward, Orion pressed himself into the stone as close as possible, screaming as he was dragged through solid stone as his makeshift mount burrowed into the world. "Up, up, upupup!" he hollered, pounding on the stone as if jerking the reins of a horse. With another groan, this time shuddering like the roaring fire of a smith's forge, the whale pulled up, moving to once again breach the ground and fly skyward.
The moment he was in open air, Orion rolled. A rock thumped into his side, and a stone bumped against his head, but he felt himself land on solid ground. The brimstone whale floated high above him, moaning its earthen song for some half-mile before it nose-dived into the stone once more.
Orion blinked the blood from his eyes and scrubbed it out of his brows with the back of his hand. Heaving, he hauled himself forward. When his head poked out over the edge of the chasm, he gasped.
Like a crack to the core, the gorge was a hundred meters across and went down further than his vision would extend. The thin orange line at the bottom, he surmised, was likely a river a mile wide, bubbling and pulsing and waiting for something soft and fleshy to fall into it and get cooked. Struggling to regain his breath, the boy rolled onto his back and snapped his tablet up before his eyes. Eyes that threatened to pop out of his head at the sight of the wild gorge carved through his landscape.
I... I never drew that. The image was an entirely different art style, more akin to the stock images that had populated his inbox in the earliest days of his memory. Nearly a photo, it stood out against his rough, penciled-in sketches like a stamp amongst scribbles, veritably laughing at him for the resolution and perfectness that had threatened to kill him.
The world had done this before. It had never been so drastic, but the last months had been rife with bugs and oddities, things he never drew populating into his spaces or things he did draw disappearing or warping from his original vision. The coding manuals in his inbox had been a good source of learning, enough that he knew that code eventually went out of whack if the system files weren't managed. But he could never get to the system files. It was the only locked folder in his entire world, requiring an absurdly long password that he could not have brute-forced in billions of years. It was the only sign of...
!
Orion's breath caught his throat and he sat bolt upright, staring.
His hands shook, and a cold sweat had broken out across his forehead, pulling watery rivulets of blood down onto his white shirt. Clicking his tongue, he tabbed over to his inventory, tapping the first aid kit and watching as it constructed next to him. With the tablet set in the grass, he set about patching up the wound on his head, the scratches on his arms, and the bruise on his side. But in the time it took to bandage himself, his eyes never left that flashing point that had not changed in over almost a decade.
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